Lewes and around

LEWES, the county town of East Sussex, straddles the River Ouse as it carves a gap through the South Downs on its final stretch to the sea. Though there’s been some rebuilding, the core of Lewes remains remarkably good-looking: replete with crooked older dwellings, narrow lanes – or “twittens” – and Georgian houses. With numerous traces of its long history still visible, some of England’s most appealing chalkland on its doorstep and the Bloomsbury Group’s country home at Charleston close by, Lewes is a worthwhile stopover on any tour of the southeast – and an easy one, with good rail connections with London and along the coast.

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Glyndebourne

Founded in 1934, Glyndebourne, three miles east of Lewes, off the A27, is Britain’s only unsubsidized opera house, and the Glyndebourne season an indispensable part of the high-society calendar. It’s undeniably exclusive – and expensive – but the musical values are the highest in the country, using young talent rather than expensive star names, and taking the sort of risks Covent Garden wouldn’t dream of. An award-winning theatre (seating 1200) has broadened this exclusive venue to a wider audience, and there are tickets available at reduced prices for dress rehearsals or for standing-room-only.

Lewes: the bonfire societies

Each November 5, while the rest of Britain lights small domestic bonfires or attends municipal firework displays to commemorate the 1605 foiling of a Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Lewes puts on a more dramatic show, whose origins lie in the deaths of the Lewes Martyrs, the seventeen Protestants burned here in 1556 at the height of Mary Tudor’s militant revival of Catholicism. By the end of the eighteenth century, Lewes’s Bonfire Boys had become notorious for the boisterousness of their anti-Catholic demonstrations, in which they set off fireworks indiscriminately and dragged rolling tar barrels through the streets – a tradition still practised today, although with a little more caution. In 1845 events came to a head when the incorrigible pyromaniacs of Lewes had to be read the Riot Act, instigating a night of violence between the police and Bonfire Boys. Lewes’s first bonfire societies were established soon afterwards to instil some discipline into the proceedings, and in the early twentieth century they were persuaded to move their street fires to the town’s perimeters.

Today’s tightly knit bonfire societies spend much of the year organizing the Bonfire Night shenanigans, when their members dress up in traditional costumes and parade through the town carrying flaming torches, before marching off onto the Downs for their society’s big fire. At each of the fires, effigies of Guy Fawkes and the pope are burned alongside contemporary, but equally reviled, figures – chancellors of the exchequer and prime ministers are popular choices.